He returned his thoughts to his notebook. His original notes had listed the full name and age of every single victim of block-23D, along with their occupation and cause of death. When he made the first copy for Jax, he had made sure to include those names, and once he began re-copying the notes, he made sure to save the names again. So much of this case seemed to be unrelated to the victims. That was a giant, gaping hole in their investigation. The victims almost always have something to do with the crime. Nobody goes through this many hoops, pulls this many strings, to kill off a block of people at random. Sure, there are some psychopaths out there, but this attack was so deliberate, so focused. So precisely planned.

Runstom ran over the list of names three times. None of them were ringing any bells, no matter how badly he wanted them to.

For some reason, he thought of the word obfuscation. The smokescreen – or as Jackson said, the tangle of wires – that the operator was trying to unravel, trying to see order among the chaos. The list of victims was like that. One victim was relevant; one victim was the real target. The rest served only to obfuscate the details of the crime. Runstom should have realized this fact from the beginning; but then again, he was just an officer trying to play detective.

In a murder investigation, when you have no leads on a suspect, you start looking at the people closest to the victim. The ModPol detectives, Porter and Brutus, seemed to look at the block of over thirty people collectively. To look at them as individual victims was too daunting a task. But then again, there was no standard procedure for dealing with that kind of homicide. No precedents had been set by previous mass-murder cases. Especially not in domes, in the civilized world. In deep space, gang-related crime was the only thing that came close, and gangbangers didn’t bother covering their tracks. In fact, most of the time, they let it be well known who was responsible for the mayhem left in their wake.

Runstom stared at the list of names one more time. A proper investigation would involve multiple detectives delving into the lives of each of these victims. He didn’t have multiple detectives at his disposal, or even access to the details of any of these victims’ lives, other than what was written in his notebook. He only had Jax, the LifSupOp and alleged murderer. They were coming at this case from the wrong side, and he feared that eventually they really were going to hit a dead end. They had been caught up in the moment, following each new clue as they found it, never looking back. It wasn’t a real investigation. And it was just a matter of time before they’d get brought in by ModPol and would have to face the music.

When Runstom got back to the room, he found Jax passed out on one of the beds, notebook clutched tightly in his arms. He pulled on the notebook, managing to wriggle it free from the operator’s grip. Jax rolled over in his sleep.

The notebook was folded over, and Runstom looked at the last page. A dark, multi-lined circle highlighted: ZZZ-356201-RG

He flipped back through a few pages, but the chicken-scratch was difficult to make out, and what he could read he didn’t understand anyway. He looked at Jax and thought about waking him up. The operator was sleeping hard, and Runstom wasn’t even sure if he could wake him if he wanted to.

He tossed the notebook on the desk and decided to take advantage of the fact that they had rented a room for the night. The way things had been going lately, he didn’t know when the next time that he would have the opportunity to sleep soundly in a good bed might be.

“It’s the manufacturer’s fake block code,” Jax said. “See, blocks are labeled with an alpha dash number dash alpha. Dome, sub-dome, block. So block 23-D is actually C-23-D, but we usually just refer to it as 23-D, because everyone knows we’re talking about dome C, which we know as Blue Haven.”

“Okay,” Runstom said. “So the ZZZ part refers to some dome ZZZ?”

“Right. Well, yes and no. The ZZZ is the dome designation, but there are no domes called ZZZ on any planets. See, when a manufacturer rolls out a new Life Support system, they don’t know what dome, sub-dome, and block it’s going to be sent to. And they have to run a bunch of tests on it before they can ship it off somewhere. So they give it a dome number of ZZZ. As soon as you see that, you know it’s a fake. A test code.”

“Gotcha.” Runstom hoped that this was going somewhere useful. “So what about the rest of it?”

“That’s the good news,” Jax said, grinning. “That seemingly random sub-dome identifier.” He looked down at the page and read off the number. “3, 5, 6, 2, 0, 1. Every plant has a unique identification number. It’s a standard, agreed upon and accepted by the different companies that do systems fabrication.”

“So the number is a reference to a specific factory?”

“Yup,” Jax said, smiling. The optimism on his face and in his voice was infectious, but Runstom had been through too much to get his hopes up just yet. “And if we get to a library, we can find a directory that indexes all those identifiers,” the operator continued. He pointed at the terminal. “The programmer who wrote this code obtained his test system from a specific plant, and now we can find out which plant that was.”

Runstom nodded. It was better than having a whole planet to scour, but still seemed to leave things a little too wide open. “So you’re thinking the programmer is, or was, an employee at this plant?”

“Well, it’s how I would do it,” Jax said, shrugging. “That’s the easiest way to get access to a system like that.”

“Okay.” Runstom figured it was best to play along since this was all they had, and it was better than nothing. What other choice did they have? He pretended to be satisfied with their only option and did some thinking out loud. “If we can get in and get talking to the right people, we might be able to find out if there were any employees that worked for a suspiciously short amount of time there. Would they have tested the program on a system inside the plant?”

“Possibly,” Jax said. “But I think they might have tried taking it off-site to work on it. And then brought it back when they were done.”

“So in that case, there’d have to be some kind of record of it. Checking out equipment, checking it back in.”

“Yeah, most likely.”

Runstom was making notes. “Okay, good.” He looked back over his notepad. “What about RG?”

“Arr-gee?” Jax said absently as he gathered some things together.

“At the end of the ID. ZZZ-356201-RG. What does the RG mean?”

“Well, normally that’s the specific block within a sub-dome.” Jax stood quiet for a few seconds, thinking. “I’m not sure what it means on a test system. Maybe when we get to the library we can find that out.”

“Ah, the fab-combination,” Jax said, pulling his head out of a book. “This is very good!”

The Grovenham Central Library wasn’t anything like the library Runstom frequented back at ModPol Outpost Gamma. The precinct library had been very compact and largely digital, though there were a few shelves of physical books and periodicals. He’d spent most of his time there at work desks and terminals, cross-referencing events and notes related to specific crimes that caught his interest – both solved and unsolved – and studying the reports and the video and audio evidence. This dome library by contrast was almost entirely populated by physical books, despite the fact that all literature was generally consumed by domers electronically.

The library was also fairly well occupied by readers. In some spaces, small groups of people gathered, having hushed but spirited discussions over the subject matter surrounding them. It only just occurred to Runstom that a common place like the library might be a natural socialization point for domers. He’d always been alone when he visited the library back at the precinct, and had associated it with escape and solitude, not a place for people to commingle.